Review 1: Auteur Approach
Ang Lee can be considered an incredibly versatile director—from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to The Hulk to Brokeback Mountain to Sense and Sensibility. Life of Pi, after being turned down by director M. Night Shyamalan, became Lee’s twelfth feature film. The versatility of cinematic style makes it hard to view Life of Pi through a formalist lens, and perhaps hard to classify Ang Lee as an auteur despite his incredible success. Though I am not too familiar with his films, though, having only seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I think if we are to consider Lee an auteur we must redefine an auteur as a director with many signatures and styles–or, perhaps Lee would resist classification as an auteur.
That said, Ang Lee won an Academy Award for Best Director for this film (one of four awarded to the film, the other three for cinematography, score, and visual effects). In an interview with ABC News, Lee notes that when he first read the book, “as a filmmaker, I didn’t see it as a movie.” In the same interview, Lee mentions that Daniel Day Lewis once told him, “You’re really an actor,” referring to his versatility as a director. In another interview with The Guardian, Ang Lee addresses the use of 3D in the film. Calling it a “new deal,” Lee highlights what seems to be one of his primary values: experimentation. His versatility and the way he talks about directing suggest that he is not preoccupied with a particular style or aesthetic, but rather that he is willing to try different techniques as a director. Also, considering the lead actor (Suraj Sharma) had no acting experience before the film, it is a testament also to Lee that the acting was convincing enough to mask Sharma’s lack of experience.
Review 2: Genre Approach
The special effects of Life of Pi were spectacular, and to top it all off the film was shot in 3D. A quarter of the four years spent making Life of Pi was post-production editing. As Lee admits, “It’s very hard to imitate God’s work.” This film meets both the popular and literary ideas of an epic: focusing on the physical journey of Pi across the ocean after a shipwreck in which he loses his entire family and becomes the only representative of humankind out in the oceanic domain, with only a starving tiger for company. At the same time, the film had an astronomical budget of 1.5 million dollars which translated to dizzyingly vibrant and dreamlike visuals of an almost-realistic tiger, marine life, and all the details of water and sky. In contrast to other epics, wherein the landscape is almost always significant but is more of a panoramic stage, Life of Pi animated this backdrop with physical movement and dynamic colors and tones. Considering so much of the film is simply Pi and the tiger adrift on the ocean with no land in sight, I think the incredibly detailed CGI and general animation of the sea and sky really helped engage audiences in a way that was pretty novel. The general feeling about Martel’s book was that it could not be translated to cinema, but Lee managed to capture this journey in a way that was never boring and was totally saturated with tone (be it color or sound) even when dialogue and acting were minimal.
Though for obvious reasons special effects were needed to make this fantastic story a cinematographic reality, I often was bothered by what I felt was an overuse of special effects. I found myself wanting either a more realistic style or, if it had to be exaggerated, then a full-on animation. What is usually achieved with makeup and elaborate props in epic films was done with computers here. However, the story and cinematography of Life of Pi are intertwined in a unique way. As adult Pi tells his story to the writer interviewing him, he reveals that the legal investigators of the shipwreck did not believe him, and so Pi tells them another story in which the animals aboard the lifeboat are allegorical representations of the human survivors. Once we begin to think of this story as imagined, this suddenly casts the artistic exaggeration of 3D spectacle into more appropriate terms. And I will say that at times the effects were so realistic that I physically jumped or squirmed in response to pouncing predators and stalking sharks.